The invention relates generally to communications networks, and more particularly to providing location-based information to mobile terminals within wireless communication networks via an access point.
Location based information services may provide information such as local advertisements, local business information, local news, local directions and providing other information based on the location of the user.
Given the significant amount of information available over the packet-based communication networks and the ease with which such information can be delivered wirelessly to mobile users, significant efforts have been made to provide information to mobile users based on their relative locations.
In wireless communication networks, at present access points are used to communicate between mobile user and backend server. Access Points are dumb communication device that just act as transit point for data packets to and from user mobile device.
Existing access points act only as transit point for messages flowing between wireless and wired networks. Typically for delivering location based information access point will send requests from mobile devices to backend server and relays the response back to the mobile terminal. This is a very useful model when huge amounts of requests are served by the backend server (quite common when the server is serving large number of access points e.g. large wireless service providers). In case of small businesses that want to disseminate information about their product, offers, contacts etc. having a separate backend server entails additional capital and maintenance cost. Also it may be overkill for the purpose. Hence there is a need to store all the local information in the access point. This will eliminate the need for backend server and connectivity to it thus saving cost. In order to serve request for local information access point has to host a web server and the associated local information. Since it is very likely that users with diverse device capabilities will connect to the access point, information delivered to the user needs to be optimized for richer user experience. To satisfy this requirement the access point needs to host information component which will interact with web server to achieve better user experience.
If there are number of access point in particular location, and if each one of them acts independently the user might be confused about which AP to connect to. Also each access point may have different storage requirements and this requirement may vary with time. Absence of sharing of storage capacity may lead to suboptimal use. In order to solve the above two problems the access points needs for co-operation among themselves so that they present as a single network to the user and share resources like storage capacity. This way each one of them can optimally use their resources and deliver better services to the user.
For disseminating location based information one has to connect access point to backend server to store and retrieve all the location related information with respect to user mobile device/terminal. And also in this case, information delivered may not be customized to each user mobile device's capabilities.
Thus there is a need for an efficient and effective way to provide location based information to mobile users.